The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, whose caricatures of the Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, caused a diplomatic crisis between Paris and Tehran last Sunday, published caricatures with the Ayatollah in its new issue.
On the cover of the new issue, which is usually published on Wednesdays, there is a caricature of religious leaders in various situations, some of which have sexual connotations.
The paper itself featured caricatures of the Ayatollah as an allusion to the executions in Iran of those accused of ties to the protest movement.
Iran has been facing a wave of protests since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16 after she was arrested by morality police in Tehran for allegedly violating a strict dress code.
In the new issue, the newspaper's director Laurent Souriso, known by the nickname Ris, wrote that the cartoons did not seem to make religious officials in Iran laugh much.
Charlie Hebdo published the first cartoons last Sunday in a special edition for the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the newsroom on January 7, 2015.
The weekly reported in December that Khamenei's "international caricature contest" aims to support "Iranians who are fighting for their freedom."
Of the 300 drawings received, especially from the exiled Iranians themselves, "the most successful, the most original and the best" were chosen, Rees added.
"It's our way of showing support for the Iranian men and women who are risking their lives to defend their freedom from the theocracy that has oppressed them since 1979," Rees wrote in an editorial.
After the publication of the first cartoons, a protest was held in Tehran in front of the French embassy, where demonstrators burned the French flag. The Iranian authorities also reacted.
"The offensive and obscene act of publishing cartoons against religious and political authority will not go without an effective and firm response," Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdolahian wrote on Twitter.
Then the website of the weekly newspaper was the target of a hacker attack.
After the attack on the newsroom on January 7, 2015, when 11 well-known journalists and cartoonists were killed because of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo decided to continue the same editorial policy.
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